


Clay Masks

by daredevilmoon



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, M/M, The Great War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 15:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2817029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daredevilmoon/pseuds/daredevilmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War makes something of them all.<br/><i>The war seemed the funniest joke in the world and, indeed, if Thomas hadn’t have been a part of the punchline, he would have laughed a lot harder. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Clay Masks

The stars overhead shone, though not as brightly as they did from the trenches; it was as though a closer proximity to Hell brought alive their flames. Though if that were the case, it seemed as sure a thing that they should be as bright from where Thomas stood - turning anxiously to the horizon. The stretcher still lay at his feet, Davies allegedly doing a quick scouting for any living, though he’d been gone so long Thomas began to wonder whether he was being privately ripped to pieces by the rations, tucked away in some crater. He looked to each side of him and saw no movement, but the ink-black of every form could have easily hidden them away.

He practically leapt into the air when he felt something hit his calf; the surprise had been such that he had no time even to register whether it had hurt before he made to get down into one of the numerous craters beside him. Then Davies spoke, breaking the terror which had momentarily gripped him.

“It’s too small for me,” Davies said, his voice sharp. He spoke with the voice of a man with a great deal more authority than he had, a great deal more maturity. “See if it fits you.”

Thomas looked down and made out the murky shape of a boot from where it had bounced from his leg. For a moment, he simply stared at it unblinkingly - somehow the thing seemed as likely a decent cup of tea - before he looked behind him to assure that where he stood was more or less free of human debris and sat heavily upon the ground.

He worked his own sodden boot off, grabbing the offered one and praying to nothing in particular that it fit. His boots had begun coming to pieces fairly early and with that poor workmanship came his dull terror of trench foot; the officers wanted each man in dry socks, but of course said nothing about providing better boots to keep them that way past fifteen minutes. This new boot, however - thank Christ. A shaky, elated relief made doing it up a bother, but he managed as quickly as he could.

“Have you got the other?” Thomas asked. Davies pitched it at him and he caught it against his chest, hurrying his foot from the damp into the relative comfort of the secondhand boots. He looked up and saw Davies walking towards him, with his weird farmer’s bowleg; in the distance, Thomas pictured him a much older man.

“We’re not finding any living,” Davies informed with a sigh, leaning backward with his hands on his hips as though to work out his hard day. He looked at Thomas and said, as if this were a regular conversation, “I’m fagged.”

“We ought to start bringing the others in,” Thomas said, though he felt no inclination to move. His entire body hurt, an ache emanating from someplace within and finding itself throbbing into each of his sinews. So distracted with the realisation of the pain, he found no place within him carrying the fortitude to say a word to the contrary when Davies sat down beside him for a smoke.

Thomas retrieved his own cigarettes and lit one, his brain seeming to fizz awake at that first gratifying burst of nicotine. He sighed quietly and caught Davies staring at him, amused.

“You enjoyed that like most men enjoy a fuck. Must be nice,” Davies said, laughing. He shook his head lightly and then removed his helmet, placing it in his lap. He ran his hands through his hair, freeing it from the sweat-plastered style.

“Careful,” Thomas said, “wouldn’t want any of the lice evicted.”

Davies laughed again. There was a strange vibrancy about him that Thomas very much enjoyed for company in the circumstances, though there was little doubt that he would never have done so in any others. Still, it was hard to watch him - the very fact of his carriage at once thrilled and repulsed Thomas, as though Davies were making a mockery of the corpses he carried - but Thomas couldn’t find it in himself to hate it. Davies wasn’t of those arrogant, fearless men - he was only just _alive_ : there was the crux. There was the appeal.

“What’d you do before?” Davies asked, inclining his head slightly in Thomas’s direction to take him in.

“Service - a valet,” he lied.

“How’s it you didn’t get to being a batman?”

“Poor planning.”

Davies raised his eyebrows and whistled lowly, ending on an “I’ll say.” Assuming a reciprocal interest, Davies began his own story. “I worked at me dad’s before. Cobbler’s up in York. He died a while back and the whole thing started going under, so I thought: Hell, there’s your chance and signed up. Don’t think I ever made such a poor fucking show for choice,” he said, voice strangely light for the tale he was imparting. He shrugged. “Suppose it passes the time.”

Thomas laughed at that, a sudden surprised little bark. It was a bloody mad thing to have said, and he could read the fact on Davies’s face that he thought so, too, but it was the sort of thing that many of the men had taken to repeating. The war seemed the funniest joke in the world and, indeed, if Thomas hadn’t have been a part of the punchline, he would have laughed a lot harder. As it was, his laughter seemed to die short without even his having intended it.

“Thought I’d get out of this,” Thomas volunteered in the lull. “Signed up straight on thinking I’d get home service. Too bloody funny.”

“Bad luck all over, eh?”

“I’ve been having a run,” Thomas said; his bad luck had stretched far beyond the confines of war. Childhood, lovers - nothing had ended especially well for him, but at least nothing before had threatened an end from a howitzer. That had to have been said for his past.

“It’s a damned shame,” Davies said, staring at Thomas with his boyishly open face. And Thomas wondered, wishing he didn’t.

It wasn’t the same as home, he knew that. There had been, at least not for him, no camaraderie in the run of things - it had always been easy to tell when there was something else intended. A strange skill allotted to his sort, reading so deftly between lines of suggestion; there, a match to a cigarette could mean the world. Out here, however, men - presumably normal men - carried on in a way that made the lines blur between knowledge and it put Thomas on edge. It eroded the lines of safety and it grew worse the longer he had been in France, not for want of lust but simply for the necessity to feel a piece of humanity that wasn’t dying beneath his fingertips.

The thought set a vice growing from the earlier ache which constricted around his chest awfully and he sat trying to clear the frantic rush of thoughts from his mind - suddenly the mud beneath his fingers was viscera and, Christ, it may well have been; he tore his hand from the ground and placed it on his knee. Then that vice burst open, smashing against his ribcage with a noticeable pain: Whose all blood stained his uniform?

He held his breath for a moment, exhaling only to take another drag of his cigarette and to hold his breath again; he couldn’t do this, neither a soldier nor a neurasthenic be. He shut his eyes for a moment against the stars, against the blood he imagined overtaking him like a jolly seaside tide.

“All right, Barrow?”

Thomas nodded: a blatant lie. As if any of them were all right.

He opened his eyes again and seemed to see the stretch of eternity against the horizon, hobbled as it was with the snuffed lives of so many men. As if only becoming aware of the fact of his own existence once more, he felt the sudden chill of the mud creeping from his arse up his back - then, more slow to register, the warmth of Davies’s thigh pressed to his own.

There was a strange buzzing going through Thomas, radiating outward from that touch and he suddenly found himself off like a whizzbang, mouth pressed to Davies’s. It lasted for only a few seconds, a clumsy crush with fingers tangled in his hair's stale sweat, before the fact of what he was doing struck him. He pulled away abruptly, heart pounding as he felt Davies’s surprise register as though it were his own.

Panic - a new panic, at once as dangerous as that of any borne of the Boche, far better and worse all at once - ripped through him and if he’d had less dignity he thought he might have run. Instead, he stayed as he was and stared with distant eyes into the darkness, as though anything to be found there would be more likely to save than to damn him.

“You couldn’t have done that to one the whores in the village?” Davies asked. Thomas nearly laughed; of all the responses of soldiers who would not respond in kind, this was not what Thomas had been prepared for.

“Didn’t you read the pamphlets?” Thomas asked. The first thing that had come to mind for the surprise. Davies - thank god, thank god - Davies laughed. It was only a huffed little thing, be it had cracked his face all the same, cracking some of Thomas’s fear along with it.

“I don’t know George meant stick it in your fellow soldier,” he replied, still laughing slightly around his second cigarette. He looked at Thomas, eyebrows raised.

“We got different pamphlets, then.”

“That so?”

“‘Don’t litter France with Tommie bastards. Do your part - give your brothers a hand’. You know, all that,” Thomas said, because that was how to get away from things like this, the accusation of, perhaps, enjoying the company of fellow men. The others did things, he knew, but the play they enacted was a delicate balance of internal cries of necessity atop realised cries on the tightness of their girls’ cunts or the size of her breasts. The trap door to get one from trouble was simply to be normal - then you seemed more or less free to sin as you wished. The thought galled and rage threatened to overwhelm the last  traces of panic; one emotion loosed seemed to have invited them all.

“Well, Christ,” Davies said, tearing Thomas from his bitter revery. He ran his hand over his face, then back through his hair as Thomas watched him tentatively. “Mine just said to keep my prick to myself.”

“You must have got the one special for choirboys,” Thomas said. Amusement was evident in his voice, but it was him taking on his own part in this play; he could play a false part better than any, he was sure. He done so for years in peacetime. “Suppose we ought to get to the pallbearers act now.”

“Better late than never. Poor sods,” Davies said as they stood in unison, brushing what they could of the ground from themselves. He looked at Thomas solemnly. “You ought to get something worse on them boots before we head back.”

Thomas glanced at the boots, then back at Davies with an unpleasantly tight smile. “Let the bastards say what they like. I don’t give a fuck.”


End file.
